Economic problems not too easy to solve

Because this is a presidential election year, I am hearing so much of the usual rhetoric about why I should vote for this guy over that one. Something I not only expected to be bombarded with but I knew would be a major topic of discussion would be the economy.

Of course the economy is not where it should be – and because President Barack Obama said back before the start of his presidency that if he couldn’t get things changed in four years no one in Washington would be there next election cycle. Well things have not changed so drastically that his prediction should not come true – many of our elected officials in statehouses and the national house should be given their walking papers.

I am one of the people who if given a better alternative than Pres. Obama would be willing to see him walk too. He has not been the president he promised and his administration has not done what he said it would. But that said Mr. Mitt Romney is a worse alternative so stay where you are, Barack.

Now why do I say Romney is a worse alternative. Well first and foremost as a business executive he is part of the problem with the world’s economy. He said triumphantly he knew where jobs come from and how to make them – well if you know that then you know that you cannot create them in this business climate. To explain what I mean you have to think about employee productivity, which has gone so high that it is alarming. Think about the company you work for – if it existed in say 1980 you can recall that there were more people who worked in that company. Back when computers, robots and the magical Internet were not nearly as ubiquitous as today, you had to have more people to do the same amount of work. One employee could only type so many carbon copied letters or punch/read so many punch cards. Think about it, say you had a 400-page document – in 1980 it needed to be typed by hand by not one, not two, not three, but probably 10 people each doing a particular part of the document. Now everytime it is edited to the point when pages have to be repaginated the entire thing has to be redone. Today something that took that many people, multiple people to edit, multiple people to proof, lots of typewriter ribbon, lots of white out (for all you kids out there who don’t know what that is… that’s exactly what I’m talking about here) and frankly lots of time to perform.

Fast forward 30 years, one person could do all that with even the most rudimentary computer. Typing (or scanning it in rather), editing, proofing, printing all could take mere hours if not minutes. So lots of clerks in the old day terminology and secretaries and admins are gone – replaced with a few data/word processors. This is just one job that easily demonstrates how the economy is so difficult to improve. Think about it.

There are so many jobs that either do not exist any more or because of technology there aren’t as many as there used to be. Airlines, banks, even schools have all taken to consolidating because of technology. Things that people did just don’t exist anymore – or they are not needed in front of you anymore so the customer can be in the US and the service person can be in anywhere in the world.

Another of the biggest reasons more and more jobs are not sprouting up is that people do more work for the money they get. People work on their smartphones before they head out to work, send out e-mails while they are sitting on the airport tarmac waiting to take off, illegally from their laptops in their cars, reading proposals as they are getting their kids ready for bed and even while they themselves are lying in bed attempting to sleep. All that increased productivity — much of which companies are not compensating us for — allows companies to keep a trim workforce because the work is getting down with half or a third of the line employees. Think about my boss doesn’t hire new people as long as the work is getting done. When things start to slip and the employees say there’s no more ‘room’ in the day to do all the work needing to be done, then new employees get hired.

Finally the biggest reason for such slow economic growth: consolidation! Going back to 1980 think about the banks that existed – JPMorgan Chase was not around because all the mergers that created it had not happened. Manufactures Hanover, Chemical Bank, Chase (the independent bank), and countless others all employeed millions of people at different branches. Let’s look at Manufacturer’s Hanover. This one bank started in 1905 as NYS Chartered Citizens Trust Company of Brooklyn that through merger and acquisition over 90 years swallowed more than twenty other banks – all the while closing branches and laying off people. Eventually in 1992 it merged with another of New York’s largest banks – Chemical Bank. Well as you would know it in 1996 Chemical merged with Chase and eventually closed hundreds of branches and laying off thousands of people. Can you believe this: at one point in time if you stood at an intersection in midtown Manhattan there were 4-6 bank branches on a signle corner – a Manufactures Hanover, Dime, Chemical, Chase, BNY, all on the same corner. Each bank branch had people employeed – so hundreds/thousands of branches with thousands of people — in New York alone all closed because of m&a activity. Then Chemical and Chase merge and you can stand at the same corner in midtown and now there is only an ATM not even a branch.

So you want to say that Mr. Romney could cause the economy to grow and cause businesses to hire new employees. Then we have to decerease productivity, get a lot of companies to reverse their mergers and simply create a lot of new businesses – and I don’t mean small businesses – we need thousands of medium and large businesses. If he could do that then he would be the president for me and should be the president of the Earth in fact.